Quotes About War

Stay down, Stubby, or you'll get your head shot off," Conroy warned me. He didn't have to tell me. Seeing as how I was fond of my head, I lay low when the bullets flew.

There was no nobility in war. Only suffering.

But, deep in her heart she knew more than what the words read or heard seemed to say. She knew that every letter in every word in every war bulletin was, somewhere, first written in blood of men, of human beings, who had once smiled and sung songs, eaten, drunk, slept and loved.

I had a cousin, Randall, killed on Iwo Jima. Have I told you? Have I told you his was a beautiful smile? Not the smile of a cynic, nor the easy, hungry smile of boys his age, whose smiles that aim to get them somewhere, are a commodity in exchange for God knows what. No. His was completely without intent; an accident of a smile. The kind of smile that would have surprised him if he could have seen it for himself. But he was too young to know his own extraordinariness.

American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.

she had stood at the gate of her compound and told the Japanese soldiers there that if they tried to come in and get her girls, they would have to do it across her dead body. This

The infamous "Rape of Nanking" that occurred not long afterward, just 102 miles farther north, tells a story of what might have happened at my childhood home were it not for that commander.

This story is about John, who was a private in the 2nd Georgia Battalion Infantry. I had always been told that John had taken part in Pickett's Charge, the bloody assault on Cemetery Ridge on July 3, 1863. Actually he was mortally wounded very close to Cemetery Hill on July 2 the day before that tragic charge.

The conquering army had perpetrated untold atrocities. The Japanese had occupied my home and twice forced us to leave the land I loved.

One of the novels that was hardest for me to write had to deal with the horrible slaughter of war. I almost didn't finish Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom for just that reason.

Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump.

The name of the exhibit that my body is in, here with good ol' Sergeant Stubby, is The Price of Freedom.

The name of the exhibit that my body is in, here with good ol' Sergeant Stubby, is The Price of Freedom. When they point from the other side of the glass, Freedom isn't free, I hear the patriots say. Blah, blah, blah. They're right, but not for the reasons they think they are. The Great War cost me a lot, and although it's not a competition, on this, the eve of my centenary, I can honestly conclude that it cost Whit more.

I stood looking at the men—more my men now than ever before. Their lives, if they escaped with them, would be divided forever into Before the War, the War, and After, and between those divisions would stretch psychic no-man's-lands as desolate as any in France.

After the woods our good cheer was quelled by the faint first whiff of a real battlefield, a gagging combination of shit and gunpowder, gas and blood, decaying flesh and muddy rot.

By showing me to the injured men, the army told them, This fluffy, cooing thing with its wooden leg is what the public will know of the ravages of war. Your task is to remain unseen. By showing me to the public, the army told them, War is a game, and its costs are light enough to be borne by even this little bird. The burgeoning American empire demanded sacrifices; my job was to help make them acceptable, even entertaining.

Munson was a member of the unit to which Corporal Gault assigned me after I flew my tenth mission back home to Rampont, a unit that would soon be known throughout the world as part of the Lost Battalion. That summer it was still simply the 1st Battalion of the 308th Regiment of the United States Army's 77th Infantry Division, under the command of newly minted Major Charles White Whittlesey.

Before the war few pastimes afforded me greater pleasure than wandering through the city, ending up somewhere strange. But now, having been twice officially lost—lost as in waylaid, misplaced, unreachable, doomed, lost as in the Lost Battalion—I find the appeal is itself somewhat lost to me.

Like the angel holding the globe on the statue's pedestal, we infantry tried to hand the world back to itself intact, though we who fought have been blown apart. Whether the world will hold together remains to be seen.

Throughout the war I looked back on that evening at the Harvard Club with great fondness, recalling it as the moment when I found my footing among the officers and struck up some of my truest friendships. But then the Pocket tainted my nostalgia, as it tainted everything else.

Among the men, only Whit kept his face clean-shaven; how he did it in the absence of privacy and clean water, I'll never know. I also knew that our major kept up a strong front during the day, his cheer unflagging, but wept uncontrollably while asleep in his funkhole.

Whenever they occupied Belgian or French territory, the Germans would order all pigeons in the region destroyed.

The worst thing about Farrington's poem is that it presents the vast obscenity that was the Great War as a jolly adventure—but in fact any war story, no matter how unsparing or how true, warns against war only if its audience wants to be warned.

So in that dark and tangled night, the chaw of chaws rose to flight, with talons bloodied, feathers singed. A battle won - a war begins!